Manufacturing and Quality Control blog

Like any business venture, manufacturing is often full of challenges, setbacks and surprises. Some of these are related to how the environment affects manufacturing. And while some of them are preventable, there are others that simply fall beyond your scope of control.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice, environmental compliance audit

Knowing these three complications of sub-suppliers can help you maintain a very reliable and socially compliant supply chain.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

You may feel that monitoring and improving environmental management systems comes secondary to manufacturing a quality product. But nowadays more and more brands think that protecting the environment needs to be an important part of their supply chain. Not only can environmental compliance open doors to working with other retailers for distribution, it can also give stakeholders assurance that you’re taking responsibility to protect our planet from destructive business practices.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

Indicating to the supplier that you care about the relationship is a step in the right direction to improving it. But just saying you care is not enough. Time and well-placed effort are ultimately what create strong supplier relationships. Here are a few tips to help you foster a stronger business partner.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

Rework sometimes comes at a considerable cost, can delay shipping and can even create more defects than it fixes. But sometimes it can also fix minor, major, or critical defects affecting your order. The final decision to rework or not depends on your situation and ultimately rests in your hands.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

A non-compete agreement can safeguard the relationship you have with your vendor and also give you the factory access you desire to improve your products.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

Eliminating disruptions to manufacturing in China is not always entirely possible, but armed with this information they are at least less severe.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

Whatever your perception of corruption in manufacturing, you probably haven’t considered some of the many other issues that might challenge QC auditor integrity. These days, corruption often takes more subtle forms. Whether you’re working with a third-party inspector or hiring your own auditors, ask them to explain how they deal with and avoid potential integrity problems. Do they have a strict policy against accepting gifts, payment or other compensation from factory staff? Do they rotate auditors to avoid any one auditor becoming too close with a factory?

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

A reliable courier is important in order to deliver the samples on time so that you can approve or decline the sample and let the supplier know if production can begin. What’s a reasonable cost to ship a product sample from Asia? There are a few factors that affect the shipping cost for product samples, such as origin, destination, number of parcels, weight and dimensions. You’ll probably want to choose the courier that offers you a combination of the most reliable shipping and the lowest price.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

You might be surprised by what your independent auditor CAN and CANNOT do regarding scheduling and conducting a service on your behalf. It’s important for you to understand what factors your QC company can’t control so that you can address those with your supplier directly and avoid costly quality issues, shipping delays and other undesirable effects of losing control of production.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice